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Indictment states Bin Laden is recruiting Americans

Special to World Tribune.com
Friday, May 21, 1999

A former U.S. Army sergeant has been indicted on charges that he participated in a plan by Saudi millionaire exile Osama bin Laden to kill Americans abroad.

An indictment filed in U.S. district court in Manhattan states that Bin Laden and his colleagues have been trying since at least 1989 to recruit American citizens to launch terrorist operations.

Ali Mohamed, 46 who emigrated from Egypt, was accused of being part of Bin Laden's campaign to kill U.S. military personnel stationed in Saudi Arabia and Somalia as well as helping in last August's bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Mohamed, a former major in the Egyptian military, was in the U.S. Army reserves during Bin Laden's conspiracy. He entered the United States in 1985 and became a citizen. A year later he enlisted in the U.S. Army and remained until 1994.

The indictment said Mohamed was working for Bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization since 1990. He helped Bin Laden in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Sudan. The United States allowed the entry of thousands of Muslim fighters after they fought Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the early 1980s.

Al Qaeda, the indictment said, also operated through such organizations as the Egyptian-based Jihad and the organization led by Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, convicted in 1996 for a plot to bomb New York City landmarks and kill political and religious figures.

Egypt has issued a request for the extradition of Mohammed, one of 107 Jihad members sentenced two weeks ago in a military court. Most of the defendants were sentenced in absentia. Egypt has also requested the extradition of about two dozen other defendants from the Arab states and Britain.

The indictment says Mohammed helped Al Qaeda review U.S., British, French and Israeli targets. Mohammed is said to have acquired documents about surveillance and explosives and "the planning of terrorist operations and the structuring of a terrorist group into different cells."

Friday, May 21, 1999



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